One Hundred Times to China by Lloyd Kropp

Author:Lloyd Kropp
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: tinku
ISBN: 9780307814982
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-12T04:30:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Children’s Castle

AFTER LUNCH the children ran off to play and the adults gathered in the supply barn behind the feed and grain store. “We have these things every day after lunch,” Fielding whispered to him. “I give my state of the union message and then we have this town meeting. It seems to make everyone happy.”

The smell of old wood and damp soil and mold hung in the sour air. The earth and the weathered barn boards and the glints of sunlight blended into shades of brown and murky yellow. Enormous wooden pegs along the wall supported a miscellany of tools and implements—cultivators, grinding wheels, an old wood plow, harnesses, chains and hooks, and a block and tackle, its gears choked with rust. Above him, the rafters crossed over an empty hay loft, and higher up, where the slat-and-tar-paper roofing had rotted away, shafts of yellow slanted down through the dusty air, filling the barn with an oily light.

They sat at an ancient oaken workbench beneath the overhang of the hayloft. Mr. and Mrs. Patterson sat across from him, Swain and Blackwell to their left, and the young girl, Mary Stockbridge, at the foot of the table. Fielding sat at the other end hunched over a brown notebook in which he had made a series of entries in pencil. He looked up at everyone and smiled.

“As you all know we have a new person today,” he said. “This is Arthur Ferrier, and his children are Christopher and David.”

“Nice to see you again. Very nice indeed,” said Swain quietly. He gave Arthur a small, tentative smile. His thick notebook was spread out before him on the table, and his breast pocket bristled with ballpoint pens. Arthur caught a glimpse of lists and dates and simple drawings and long pages of what looked like a running narrative, all written in Swain’s beautiful, cramped printing. The world turned on sheets of green notebook paper. Turning like the odor of the barn and its labyrinth of associations, turning like leaves in autumn and time passing, turning like running water under the earth and the taste of dust and silver in his mouth.

Blackwood, the pirate with the beautiful hands, looked at him with a terrible, sudden sadness and did not seem to know what to say. He was no longer dressed for melodrama—Arthur had a clear image now in his mind of the handsome boy dressed all in black, wooing Marilyn with his longing looks and his talk of stars. But with his curly black hair, his soft face with its narrow chin, and his thin wrists and arms, he still seemed heartbreakingly and unintentionally comic, like a cartoon of a matinee idol. After a moment he waved awkwardly and whispered something across the table that Arthur could not catch.

“—nothing much has been reported since yesterday,” Fielding was saying.

Arthur took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. His stomach was full of chicken soup, and the cool, acid smell of the barn was deeply nostalgic.

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